Sydney Smith
24 quotes.
Quotes by Sydney Smith
- A great deal of talent is lost in this world for the want of a little courage.
- Brevity is in writing what charity is to all the other virtues. Righteousness is worth nothing without the one, nor authorship without the other.
- Find fault, when you must find fault, in private, if possible, and some time after the offence, rather than at the time.
- Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.
- I am for frank explanations with friends in cases of affronts. They sometimes save a perishing friendship, and even place it on a firmer basis than at first; but secret discontent must always end badly.
- [L]ook evil in the face; walk up to it, and you will find it less than you imagined, and often you will not find it at all; for it will recede as you advance.
- Let every man be occupied, and occupied in the highest employment of which his nature is capable, and die with the consciousness that he has done his best.
- Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.
- Mankind are always happier for having been happy; so that if you make them happy now, you make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it.
- Manners are the shadows of virtues.
- No man can end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.
- Passion gets less and less powerful after every defeat.
- Politeness is good nature regulated by good sense.
- Remember that every person, however low, has rights and feelings. In all contentions, let peace be rather your object, than triumph: value triumph only as the means of peace.
- The fact is, that to do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can.
- There are many ways of being frivolous, only one way of being intellectually great; that is honest labor.
- There is but one method of success, and that is hard labor; and a man who will not pay that price for distinction had better at once dedicate himself to the pursuit of the fox.
- There is no man suddenly either excellently good or extremely evil.
- Try to make at least one person happy every day, and then in ten years you may have made three thousand, six hundred and fifty persons happy, or brightened a small town by your contribution to the fund of general enjoyment.
- We know nothing of to-morrow; our business is to be good and happy to-day.
- We should accustom the mind to keep the best company by introducing it only to the best books.
- Whatever you are from nature, keep to it; never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing!
- When you meet with neglect, let it rouse you to exertion, instead of mortifying your pride. Set about lessening those defects which expose you to neglect, and improve those excellences which command attention and respect.
- You will find people ready enough to do the Samaritan without the oil and twopence.